What is Product Stewardship?

What is Product Stewardship?

Product Stewardship is an environmental management strategy where the company that designs, produces, or sells a product takes responsibility for minimizing the product’s environmental impact throughout all stages of the product’s lifecycle, including end-of-life management. The greatest responsibility lies with whoever has the most ability to affect the full lifecycle environmental impacts of the product. This is most often the manufacturer or producer of the product, though other stakeholders such as suppliers, retailers, and consumers, also play a role.

Product Stewardship (PS) and Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) are terms that are often used interchangeably to describe policy approaches and long-term solutions to managing products at their end-of-life by shifting the operational and/or financial burden of responsible collection, transportation, and end-of-life management of products away from local governments to producers. The Product Stewardship Institute, Upstream, the California Product Stewardship Council and others define EPR as a mandatory type of product stewardship required by law.

Why Product Stewardship?

Local governments try their best to provide recycling services, but they often lack the resources to handle the wide range of products that require specialized disposal—especially those containing toxic materials like electronics or mercury-containing light bulbs. Some products pose significant environmental and human health risks and are often costly to manage at their end of life. Without adequate funding and infrastructure, many of these products that are reusable, recyclable and / or toxic end up in landfills or the environment – resulting in valuable resources being lost and harm to the environment.
 
Under a Product Stewardship program, producers create a system to recycle and/or properly dispose of their own products. In most cases, the recycling program is managed by a Stewardship Organization on behalf of the producers, also sometimes referred to as a Producer Responsibility Organization (PRO).  The Stewardship Organization works with local governments, collectors, recyclers, and processors to provide end-of-life management services.

Product Stewardship programs are funded by a fee applied to each covered product sold on the market. When producers pay this fee, they are incentivized to reduce waste and make their products more recyclable and/or reusable and less toxic to reduce their costs. In certain cases, the fee is paid upfront by consumers at the point of sale. These fees are used to cover the end-of-life management costs, ensuring that collection, recycling, and/or disposal services can be provided to residents free of charge.

Definitions and Terms
Product Stewardship

Product Stewardship is an environmental management strategy that means whoever designs, produces, sells, or uses a product takes responsibility for minimizing the product’s environmental impact throughout all stages of the product’s life cycle, including end-of-life management. The greatest responsibility lies with whoever has the most ability to affect the full life cycle environmental impacts of the product. This is most often the producer of the product, though all within the product value chain plays a role. 

Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR)

There are varying definitions for this term.

  • The Organisaton for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD): “EPR is a policy approach that makes producers responsible for their products along the entire lifecycle, including at the post-consumer stage. An EPR policy is characterised by the shifting of responsibility (physically and/or economically; fully or partially) upstream to producers; and the provision of incentives to producers to take into account environmental considerations when designing their products.” 
  • The Product Stewardship Institute: “EPR is a mandatory type of product stewardship that includes, at a minimum, the requirement that the producer’s responsibility for their product extends to post-consumer management of that product and its packaging. There are two related features of EPR policy:
    • (1) shifting financial and management responsibility, with government oversight, upstream to the producer and away from the public sector; and
    • (2) providing incentives to producers to incorporate environmental considerations into the design of their products and packaging.”
  • Upstream: “Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) is a policy tool that makes producers legally and financially responsible for mitigating the environmental impacts of their products and packaging. EPR extends the producer’s responsibility for their product to the post-consumer management of that product and/or its packaging – often requiring producers to be responsible for waste recovery and recycling.”
  • California Product Stewardship Council: “Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) is a strategy to place a shared responsibility for end-of-life product management on the producers, and all entities involved in the product chain, instead of the general public; while encouraging product design or redesign that minimizes the negative impacts on human health and the environment at every stage of the product’s lifecycle. This allows the costs of processing and recycling or disposal to be incorporated into the total cost of a product. This also places primary responsibility on the producer, or brand owner, who ultimately makes design and marketing decisions for their products. It also creates a setting for recycled commodities markets to emerge, which helps support a true circular economy.”
Producer

Producers refer to the companies that design, produce and/or sell products. Producers are the entities that assume primary responsibility or are required to take responsibility for the end-of-life management of their own products. EPR policies aim to place the responsibility on the entity that makes decision on the design and marketing of products as they have the greatest ability to minimize the life cycle impacts of products and packaging. The definition of producers depends on the product / program and legislation in place.  

Typically, the definition of producers follows a tiered approach: 

  1. Manufacturer of the product under their own brand or no use of a brand 
  1. The company that is licensed to manufacture the product 
  1. The brand owner 
  1. The importer  
  2. The company that first distributes the product in a market 
Stewardship Organization / Producer Responsibility Organization (PRO) 

This term is used to describe the organization that is appointed by a producer to act as an agent on behalf of the producer to administer a product stewardship / EPR program. A Stewardship Organization or PRO manages the collection, transportation, recycling and/or disposal, and reporting related to the covered products under a product stewardship / EPR program. The Stewardship Organization or PRO collects the fee applied to each covered product sold on the market to fund the end-of-life management of those products. Often Stewardship Organizations and PROs are required to be not-for-profit organizations.  

Eco-Modulation

Eco-Modulation is a type of fee structure used in EPR programs that aims to incentivize product and/or packaging design that reduces overall environmental impacts. It penalizes the use of materials that are less environmentally friendly or disruptive to reuse or recycling systems and rewards the use of materials that are better for the environment or that are designed in ways that support effective reuse and recycling.   

About NWPSC

The Northwest Product Stewardship Council (NWPSC) is a coalition of government organizations in Washington and Oregon that work together to develop and improve Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) policies and programs